


walk through the fire

by callunavulgari



Series: Holiday Writing Challenge '12 [22]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Car Sex, Explicit Language, Humanstuck, M/M, thigh fucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:51:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The zombie thing isn’t... well, it isn’t entirely unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	walk through the fire

**Author's Note:**

> Day 22 of the Holiday Writing Challenge on tumblr [over here](http://giraffe-tier.tumblr.com/post/35469673249/winter-drawing-writing-challenge). Prompt was 'huddle for warmth'. This fucking thing would not. stop. drifting. into. second. motherfucking. person. Just. Never again will I try to write Homestuck in anything but second-person. Never fucking again, oh my god. So uh, keep an eye out for lapses into second person.

The zombie thing isn’t... well, it isn’t entirely unexpected. They’ve spent years making fun of zombies movies—years of the media exploiting the zombie craze. Karkat can remember a time when there were internet survival guides, television shows, even, for the very strange, fucking zombie dildos. The thought makes him shudder now, and he wonders if anyone who had ever bought one survived the initial outbreak—if they’re horrified now for once fetishizing the dead or if they’re, god fucking forbid, _still_ fetishizing them.  
  
Zombies aren’t sexy. They’re horrifying, half-rotted and maggot covered. Sure, the freshly dead are more gray and smelly than actually bile-inducing, but the thought of a corpse like that? It makes him a fucking sick to his stomach.  
  
So the zombie thing doesn’t really come as a surprise for him. He was always more fond of cheesy rom-coms which were _glorious works of art_ and no one could tell him otherwise, but some of his foster brothers had been fond of zombies. So he knows enough to aim for the head and the first time he’s assaulted by one, he doesn’t hesitate—just takes his cleaver and slams it down on the skull hard enough to make it split like an overripe fruit, spilling steaming brains onto the snow-speckled pavement.  
  
He doesn’t have much in the way of family, but the last call that he’d managed to get through to his foster-brother was reassuring enough. Sollux was on the other side of the country, happily shooting zombies in the face with Aradia and Feferi.  
  
“Just don’t do anything stupid, KK,” Sollux told him before the call had cut out.  
  
So that’s what he’s doing. Being safe. He moves between safe houses quietly, sleeps very little, and for the most part, he keeps to himself. The other survivors that he meets are all wide-eyed with fear or squinty with distrust, so he doesn’t linger amongst them. Sometimes they’ll trade goods, other times they’ll just nod to each other briefly and move on. He thinks that there might be something to the old saying ‘safety in numbers,’ but he also knows that it’s a big fucking risk that he isn’t entirely willing to take.  
  
And besides, he’s not very fond of the idea of getting close enough to give half a fuck if one of these fuckers gets their faces chewed off. He’s content with just slowly meandering his way across the country, ever so slowly nearing where Sollux has holed himself up somewhere in Georgia, of all fucking places.  
  
He owns a gun, but for the most part he doesn’t use it. They’re too loud—attract way to much attention, and the gun that he’s got at his waist is more of an up-close-and-personal kind of firearm, which, well he’s got a cleaver for the up-close-and-personal encounters.  
  
It goes like that, him skirting the coastal states as he moves through Arizona, New Mexico, and the godforsaken near-year that he spends crossing Texas. There are cars here and there, but the highways are so clogged that it almost isn’t worth it. Mostly, he goes on foot.  
  
It isn’t until he’s finally nearing the border of Louisiana that something happens, though that something is... a kind of big something. Namely the goddamn horde of dead that manage to notice him in Houston, tracking him for miles before they manage to catch up. You’d think that with most of them having rotted or missing limbs that they wouldn’t be that great at tracking, but these are not the slow moving, shambling zombies that moan ‘brains’ after you. These are real life hunters, fully capable of sprinting for long stretches at a time and the only thing that ever manages to ooze past their mangled vocal cords is a rumbling hiss of a growl. It’s not a good sound. It makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up and a shiver roll down his spine.  
  
This new world of theirs is not a fucking movie, full stop.  
  
By the time he makes it into Louisiana, he’s panting, flushed with exertion—his muscles so sore that he just knows that if he stops long enough for the adrenaline to wear off he’s going to collapse and never get up again. They’re in full-on hunting mode and have been for hours, so long that Karkat’s body has officially sprinted past his fucking limit like it thinks there’s something at the finish line other than death by zombie or death by heart attack  
  
He’s on a back road just off of 107 and his lungs burn with the effort it takes to keep drawing air into them. He can hear them behind him, far enough back that they probably aren’t flat-out running, but close enough that he can hear their muffled hissing growls on the wind. There’s enough of them that food has got to be sparse in these parts. Maybe despite their guns, the fine people of Texas didn’t hold up to the apocalypse very well. He laughs to himself, and hears how ragged it sounds.  
  
I’m going to fucking die, Karkat thinks, and that’s when the door of a car he’s running past jerks open and a hand shoots out, dragging him in.  
  
He fights it, of course he does, but the hands draw him in until he’s got his back pressed into the creature’s chest, arms mostly pinned at his side so he can’t get enough movement to get his cleaver into anything. He feels hot breath on his neck and breaks into a cold sweat as he renews his efforts, trying to wiggle free with achingly sore muscles, his chest alight with panic.  
  
He jerks the wrong arm free and even if he can’t get to his blade, he still elbows the thing in the face and— “Fuck!”  
  
...Zombies can’t talk, he thinks. The breath against the back of his neck is coming in fast little pants now, little pained noises coming from behind before someone says, “Jesus fucking christ, Short-stack, I’m trying to help. Do you want to be zombie food?”  
  
He cranes his head around and sure enough, there’s a kid glaring at him, fresh red human blood streaming from his nose. The hit to the face seems to have dislodged a pair of shades, because they hang precariously down the guy’s nose, a faint spiderweb of a crack on the left lens that Karkat doesn’t know if he caused or not. Beyond them his eyes are clear and a strange shade of red that has Karkat frowning, but there’s none of the milky white reminiscent of cataracts that the dead possess. His white-blond hair practically gleams in the weak sunlight filtering through the window and for a second he just stares, because he hasn’t seen another human since he got into Texas a good seven months ago. Karkat opens his mouth, prepared to bombard the dude with curses or maybe just put in a quick suggestion that if this douche wants to be a hero, he should probably fucking drive, but what comes out is, “when the fuck do you find time to dye your hair?”  
  
The man stares at him for a minute, disbelieving, and then laughs—a short, quick, bark of a sound that makes blood rush to Karkat’s cheeks.  
  
He flinches when the man leans toward him, but the guy just keeps on leaning past until he can jerk the car door closed. He straightens his shades and as he’s turning the keys in the ignition he flashes Karkat a cool smirk. “I’m Dave,” he says, flooring the gas and leaving the zombies behind them.  
  
Karkat scowls at him, but inclines his head all the same. “Karkat.”  
  
.  
  
“So where are you headin, little dude?” Dave asks him later, when they’ve left Karkat’s particular horde far, far behind. The roads are strangely clear of traffic, but fuck, they’re in the middle of buttfuck Louisiana. The only thing around are swamplands and possibly zombie alligators.  
  
He frowns in Dave’s direction. “You offering to fucking drive me there?”  
  
The douche gives him the same flat poker-face expression that he’s been giving Karkat since he picked him up. “Maybe. Depends on where.”  
  
The frown deepens, but eventually he breaks the stare-off in case a zombie stumbles into the middle of the road and they have the most embarrassing accident ever—post apocalypse and not a car in sight. Wouldn’t that be fucking fantastic. “Savannah,” he finally admits, and Dave whistles.  
  
“Damn, Short-stack. What’s in Savannah?”  
  
He frowns at Dave and a whole rant is on the tip of his tongue about how it’s none of this fucker’s business, but what comes out is— “My foster-brother and his girlfriends.”  
  
Dave raises an eyebrow at him. “Dude’s got game.”  
  
“Shut up, they found love in a hopeless place or some shit. I’m not gonna fucking judge them.”  
  
Now the motherfucking douchebag has both his eyebrows near his hairline. “...Did you just quote Rihanna at me?” he asks after a moment of semi-awkward silence.  
  
“Bite me,” he hisses. “I haven’t slept in two days and that shit fucking sticks with you.”  
  
Dave snorts. He’s probably rolling his eyes behind those fucking shades right now. “I hear ya there. The last song I heard before my ipod died was Kesha. Shit was stuck in my head for weeks.”  
  
“Why the fuck did you have that shit on your fucking ipod?”  
  
Dave shrugs, but his hands tighten around the steering wheel, knuckles gone white. He’s quiet for a second before he sighs. “My Bro put her entire discography on there to fuck with me before shit went down. Didn’t get a chance to switch it back.”  
  
Karkat can read between the lines here. Even if the guy could have switched it back, he probably wouldn’t have. “My best friend got himself killed for me,” he finally offers, because fuck, if they’re sharing sob stories here he might as well go for broke. “Stupid fucker used to be on shit constantly, but when he ran out, he got real serious, real motherfucking fast. I don’t know if the meth fucked him up or if he had a psychotic break, but we got ambushed outside of San Francisco and he just... went crazy. Even after they’d torn into him he kept going until... I was safe.”  
  
He doesn’t tell Dave the way Gamzee had hugged him afterwards, surrounded on all sides by corpses—how he’d made Karkat fucking promise to get to Sollux all safe and shit—how he’d made Karkat turn away before he blew his fucking brains out. Sob stories are one thing, but there are just some things that are private—like the way Gamzee had looked at him in those last few minutes, pressing a kiss to the top of Karkat’s head and grinning in that slightly deranged way of his. How he’d laughed, “Best motherfucking miracle a brother could ask for,” and shot himself right before Karkat could turn around.  
  
Dave doesn’t offer Karkat a look of pity, but he does clap him on the back, palm warm between Karkat’s shoulderblades. “Get some sleep, man. I’ll drive you as far as I can, and you might as well snag some z’s while the car lasts.”  
  
.  
  
Turns out as far as I can is _pretty fucking far_. He wakes up seven hours later to find that they’re most of the way through Alabama and that apparently it’s good that he’s awake, because they need to fill the tank with whatever’s left of the gas canisters in the trunk.  
  
They pull over at a deserted little gas station who-the-fuck-knows where and manage to siphon enough gas to fill one of the canisters most of the way to the top. He’s spitting out the taste of gasoline, bent over and grimacing when he feels Dave’s eyes on him.  
  
“What the fuck are you looking at,” he demands, not even bothering to glance away from the shitty, cracked asphalt. When he finally turns around, Dave is smirking at him, a faint quirk to his lips that makes Karkat want to smack him in the face again.  
  
“Enjoying the view,” is all Dave says, shrugging as if it’s fucking normal to check out the ass of some random guy he saved from zombies.  
  
“You—” he sputters, his face going hot. “What the fucking fuck—”  
  
Dave’s on him the moment he starts to get loud, a hand over Karkat’s mouth and a hand fisted in his shirt. “Jesus, quiet the fuck down, Shouty. Do you want to get us eatin?”  
  
Karkat bites the palm covering his mouth out of spite, grinning when Dave curses and drops his hand. The grin vanishes as quickly as it came when Dave shoves him up against the car, the vague smirk from before gone. “Don’t fucking bite me,” he hisses, and the sound of his voice makes a ball of anger tighten in Karkat’s gut.  
  
He growls, shoving right back into Dave’s space. He should probably feel guilty—biting anyone these days is like asking to get a sword shoved into your brain—but he’s too irritated to give a fuck. “Why not, Dave?” he hisses back, batting the hand away from his throat. “What do you even want from me? Cause if you think I’ll fuck you for a ride you really should have asked for the fucking payment up front.”  
  
Dave scoffs. “And let you get torn apart? Fuck that. Don’t worry, your ass virginity is safe, shouty. Now get the fuck in the car before the sound of your voice tempts every walker nearby into taking a bite out of us.”  
  
He gets in the car. He isn’t fucking stupid, but he’s still angry enough that he just growls when Dave reaches over to pat him a few miles down the road.  
  
.  
  
They’re crossing the border into Georgia when Dave slams on the brakes in the middle of the road. It’s abrupt enough that his head slams into the dashboard and he gives a muffled curse, clutching his forehead. “What the flying FUCK was that for?”  
  
Dave glares at him. “Look, your sulking is getting on my nerves. I’m sorry, asshole, okay?” He’s rolling up the sleeve of his shirt, still glaring as he hisses, “This is why I freaked out, all right?”  
  
And there, glaringly obvious against his pale skin is a bite. It’s scarred over, the kind of ugly red scar tissue that really fucking pale people get, but the indentation of teeth is clear. “What the fuck.”  
  
“Apparently I’m fucking immune or whatever, but just. Fucking don’t. Not like that.”  
  
“You’re immune,” Karkat deadpans, because that’s fucking stupid. That’s movie shit right there—chick gets bitten, her boyfriend cries, and somehow she doesn’t turn—rejoice, happy ending! Dave heaves a sigh, bringing two fingers up to pinch the bridge of his nose.  
  
“Yeah. Zombie tried to tear my arm off when I was getting out of Houston and I never turned. It’s been months, dude, so don’t freak out. Just, that’s why.”  
  
The anger deflates like a popped balloon. The guilt is starting to set in now, thick and roiling in his stomach. Past him is a goddamn idiot. “Yeah, well I probably shouldn’t have thought it was a good idea to bite someone when the world is full of zombies.”  
  
It’s not quite an apology, but apparently it’s enough, because Dave is starting to tug his shirt back down, offering him something tentative that’s between his usual smirk and an actual smile.  
  
“Apology accepted,” he concedes as he starts the car back up.  
  
He thinks about pointing out that it wasn’t a fucking apology, but who the fuck is he kidding, of course it was.  
  
.  
  
It would be easier if Dave were less attractive. Fuck, it would be easier if Karkat wasn’t a nineteen year old kid who hasn’t been fucked in upwards of two years. But the simple truth of it is that he’s still a fucking horny teenager and Dave is pretty damn easy on the eyes.  
  
So when they stop to fill up again a few hundred miles outside of Savannah it isn’t much of a surprise when Dave shoves him up against the car and sticks his tongue down his throat.  
  
He’s a good kisser, really. It gets sloppy pretty fast, wet and hot, and for a moment Karkat doesn’t give two fucks that they might get eaten at any minute—the only thing that matters is Dave’s mouth against his.  
  
“Fuck,” he hisses when Dave pulls away. Dave grins at him, a proper toothy grin that makes heat flare in Karkat’s gut. Dave makes a hungry little noise in the back of his throat and leans down to nibble lightly at Karkat’s throat. “That’s kind of the point,” Dave murmurs, voice muffled against his skin.  
  
“So that is all this was,” Karkat says, breath hitching when Dave licks a wet line down his neck. “You did just want me for my ass.”  
  
“Nope,” Dave chirps, dropping to his knees. “That was just a bonus.”  
  
Which... yeah, okay. Whatever. He could have been picked up by some creep, but instead he got Dave. They’ve known each other for just over a day, so Karkat isn’t expecting any declarations of love. As he’s already established, life is not a fucking rom-com, and he’s not about to pass this up because he didn’t get a marriage proposal first.  
  
Dave’s mouth is even hotter around his dick, slick and perfect. He’s not afraid of testing the waters, experimenting until he finds all the places that make Karkat squirm. It’s... a good fucking blowjob and it isn’t long before Karkat’s legs are shaking, his moans too fucking loud in the quiet open stretch of road.  
  
“Get in the car,” he rasps, and for a moment Dave doesn’t listen to him—just keeps sucking his dick like he’s going for the gold medal in the cock-sucking-olympics. He groans. “Seriously, Dave, this is fucking stupid. Get in the fucking car before a zombie shows up and tries to eat us both.”  
  
After one last sloppy lick, Dave pulls back and fuck— The way his lips are swollen and red, still shiny with spit is almost enough to make him come right then and there. He must make some form of noise, a moan or a whimper or something because Dave smirks and _fuck his fucking shades, seriously._  
  
He growls, hips bucking forward when Dave wraps a hand around him, stroking him as Karkat snatches the shades from his face, and fuck, yeah, that’s better. His eyes are still a little off-putting, a bright candy apple red that makes Karkat think of fresh blood. They’re weird, but Dave’s pupils are blown wide open, and when Karkat thrusts into his hand, his eyes flash with heat and yeah, fuck, they need to get in the damn car.  
  
He manages to get the door behind him open and they tumble inside, Dave reaching over to slam the door shut behind them.  
  
In the quiet of the car, it’s easy to find Dave’s mouth again—easy to slip his tongue inside and moan as Dave twists his hips down sharply. It’s—fuck, it’s so fucking good, but— “We don’t have any lube.”  
  
Dave laughs against his throat and purrs, “Want me to fuck you, Karkitty?”  
  
“Fuck you,” he hisses, and manages to ruin the effect by keening when Dave yanks down his own pants, thrusting against him.  
  
“Again, kind of the point, are you always this repetetive?” Dave whispers. “Here, just— turn over.”  
  
Karkat scowls. “You are not fucking me dry, asshole.”  
  
Dave laughs, his breath warm on Karkat’s throat. It makes him shiver and grind up against Dave’s dick. “No— look,” Dave pants. “Seriously, trust me, just turn over.”  
  
With a dubious look, he does and then— “Oh my god, are you seriously going to fuck my thighs right now?”  
  
“Yep,” Dave says, spitting into his hand and pumping his dick a few times. “All them bitches want Dave motherfucking Strider between their thighs. Ass and pussy is so last year, man. Get with the times.”  
  
Karkat groans as Dave pushes between them. “Clench ‘em tighter,” is all Dave says and—  
  
It’s weird. Dave’s dick rubs wetly against Karkat’s balls as he thrusts, but from the way he’s panting, he’s clearly enjoying himself. And once he gets enough of a rhythm going, he gets a hand free so he can wrap it around Karkat’s dick— and well. Then it’s just the slap of skin on skin and the windows fogging up around them.  
  
After, when they’re sticky and spent and lying in each others arms, they’ll remember where they are when a zombie thumps into the side of the car. But after it’s dispatched, they’ll still settle back together, soaking in each others warmth. Turns out that southern winters are still pretty fucking cold, Karkat will think, but whatever.  
  
It’s no declaration of love and it sure as shit isn’t a proper fuck, but whatever. Maybe Dave will stick around long enough for them to find some lube and condoms so they can do it properly.  
  
  



End file.
